Strawberries

They embitter, these strawberries. We bought them at the store yesterday, at the shop of an Armenian grocer. Spreading out between people, wounded by the beautiful bustle of the plaza, we arrived at the store: the world aglow with its color and charm. The sweetness of sun and fruit bathed the morning. Mandarines, pears, peaches, kiwis, apples. The metaphor of the world's feast: the explosion, the jubilee, the work of a man. Coins passed from one hand to another. He said goodbye in his ancient tongue, blessing us, the storekeeper. Now, before the TV, while I raise the spoon and mix the strawberries with yogurt, already before tasting them, I know: bitter. Laying face down, like truncated lilies, hundreds of people. Their blood leaves dark pools, rotten streaks, in the classrooms. In Kenya, 2015. Man has died and so has God. Official bodies nowhere in sight to certify so much shame. They relish their cocktail on terraces with views of another ocean. These lives are valueless. The bodies are meaningless. This sacred liquor they brutally pour out today from the greatest possible hate is meaningless to the children of oblivion and barbarity.

In Yorick’s Childhood

Jeremy spoke in class today Pearl Jam

Yorick, small, wild swan, hidden in a trunk, you watched princes sweep past with their keen-witted falcons in arm, and their white steeds, too, as in legend, and princesses masturbate in silence before the magical mirror, moaning between sheets, blending into night. You weren't even a shadow. You weren't glad words nor dreams. Just a poor boy who hid in an empty trunk, the trunk devoid of masks, aware blood couldn't reach there. Although the insults and laughter could, mutilation and anguish also, the wound. Where else to look? Where else turn, little Yorick, wild swan? How far did your kingdom-less kingdom span, your domain?

You were the starving child no one remembered, a stanza come undone from inside, the tragi-comic verse. You, Yorick, yes, you who didn't even know how to cry and always had, in your mouth, always contorted, a final laugh on the verge of death.

Ludus Magnus

Underneath Rome's sky, morning unearths the remnants of a wrestling school. The art of dying and of killing was taught in the entrails of this structure now reduced to ruins, to black walls of masonry and vanquished arches. Gone are the columns. The marble has given way from the walls. Some idol still remains, by miracle, anchored to the inexpressive pulpit of its bygone magnificence.

Destroyed by debris and lootings, a thousand times set ablaze, dogged by landslides and cave-ins, the school of blood still gleams in darkness, you can still catch its lesson: to live, what it means to be a slave, what the heroes were named.

Through rooms, tragic and murky today, athletes once filed in all their splendor, their muscles aglow, their backs as well. In full dignity, the gladiator waged combat against the tiger in the sand, against the sky, against barbarous force. For oblivion his knees sank in earth in honor of Mithras, the god, or, post-match, he raised his cup, overflowing with nectar and victory, in a high fate spelled out by dreams.

Now, only cold and lethargy, the archeologists' lanterns, the swarming of rats, the vulgar flash of tourists remain.

Apple

You'll adore the apple you bite and that now distills its juice and pulp in your lascivious mouth. Time can't prevail against this jubilee, against this delicious letting go that flows through your lips: you're a man given up to eternity, this bite is forever.

You'll adore the sky that does away with your supermarket sadness, with the emptiness of signs that didn't disclose what they might've disclosed.

You'll adore the span of bridges that allow a crossing over and a far away forgetting, as far away as possible, the square jaw of the world that closes on you. At least this time, it won't crush the cities, it won't bring its harm on love, it won't do away with the drawings of Carmina, with the nubile caress you let fall down her back.

You will adore the day there are no steamrollers heavy enough nor powerful enough to roughly wring out this ecstasy of thirst, this moistness, this sleeping seed in the deepest of deepest depths of the apple.

ÓXIDO

Rust

Neither leather nor bronze, nor the warped news from the blows that forge the breastplate, nor the blacksmith's blue hands, nor any ironwork can save us from rust.

ANDRÉS GARCÍA CERDÁN (born in 1972, Fuentealamo-Albacete, Spain) holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Murcia. He has published several volumes of poetry, among them Los nombres del enemigo (University of Murcia, 1997), Curvas (Celya, 2009), and Barbarie (Adonais, 2015) from which the poems here are taken. He’s been a co-director of Fractal Poesia and the founder of magazines like Thader or Los deseos. He’s received international prizes like Alegria, Barcarola, Ciudad de Almunecar, Antonio Oliver Belmas and Ciudad de Pamplona. As a literary critic, he has collaborated with publications like Quimera, ABC Artes y Letras, and Dáctilo. Furthermore, Andres runs a blog called “Un Cantico Cuántico.” Lastly, he has also compiled a great and extensive anthology of poetry written in Albacete, Spain between 2006 and 2016 entitled El Peligro y El Sueño (Celya, 2016).

Currently a high school teacher and adjunct professor of writing and literature at Miami-Dade College and St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida, JORGE RODRIGUEZ-MIRALLES is also an MFA in Creative Writing graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado. He is a poet, literary critic, translator, plus enthusiastic advocate for peace-making via ecological and spiritual renewal. His poetry and literary criticism has appeared in print and online in Metropolis, TheThePoetry, Big Bridge, Cimarron Review, Bombay Gin, Danse Macabre, The Battersea Review, Osiris Poetry, Ragazine, El Coloquio de los Perros and La Galla Ciencia. In the spring of 2014, Rodriguez-Miralles published his own collection of poems, Everything/Nothing. He may be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.